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WHAT SHALL YOU SAY ABOUT IT?
WHAT SHALL YOU SAY ABOUT IT? SECTION I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES In the preceding chapter we have looked at the varic us kinds of dramatic situations which may produce the single effect. We now have to ask how these shall be presented so as to produce it. This question brings us into technique. 1. Tell the story. Foolish though it may sound, this is the first advice which the beginner must take to heart. To be sure, it does not inform him how to tell his tale; but it does direct his efforts. For the advice means that the writer must attend, first of all, to reporting the affairs which constitute the plot. Put negatively, the substance of this commandment shines forth more clearly. Let us phrase it thus: Pay no special attention to description of scenes, character drawing, philosophizing, or stylistic effects until you have stated all the essentials of the plot so clearly that the theme and the outcome and the single effect are apparent (though not necessarily vivid) and unequivocal. For many this is the hardest lesson of all. Especially does it irk those. straightaway writers who dash off their brilliant ideas at a single sitting, in white heat. Their attention inevitably fluctuates between plot and characters, characters and setting, setting and phraseology; and so, unless the story is tremendously vivid and quite simple in structure, they lose sight of some incidents upon whose sharpening the very sense and import of the narrative depend. Now I do not say that straight-away writing is therefore to be decried. Far from it. Some good writers work so most naturally, and everybody should try to. But to the beginner the danger of the method is usually present, and its avoidance does not make the above warning less trustworthy; it only shows that the particular writer is exceptionally skilful in carrying many details in his mind simultaneously. There is no denying that the story's the thing, after all; and that all its finish, its clever turns, its ingenious trappings, and its sparkling epigrams are but poor tinsel, once the drama which they overlay is veiled, blurred, or broken. Now, it is just this axiom which warrants the rule we have laid down. It is this, too, which indirectly accounts for the fact that most good story writers have served an apprenticeship as newspaper reporters. People usually suppose that the work of a reporter brings him into touch with life, and that the intimacy with , human nature which he thus acquires is what makes his stories. But this is less than a halftruth. To be sure, the reporter does rub up against the realities of things more than bookkeepers and fishwives do; but there are many professions and trades which penetrate toward the springs of human nature far more deeply than he. The average physician, the lawyer, the policeman, the settlement worker, the business man, the valet, and even the apartment janitor see some Things as They Are more lucidly than he; for they are participants and witnesses, whereas he only jots down their testimony. Why, then, is it that there are so few physicians and lawyers and valets penning memorable stories, and so many reporters doing it? It is because the newspaperman becomes proficient in setting down the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story. The facts without trimmings he must deliver daily. Doing this, he masters the first and most important trick of story telling. The beginner cannot do better than imitate the newspaper man's procedure; in its essentials. For the drill's sake, we shall schematize the latter a little beyond the form of ordinary journalistic practice. In handling a topic important enough to head a column, the reporter commonly performs three operations with his material. First, on the scene of the news-gathering (or on his way back to the office), he jots down phrase-wise the gist of the story, and its most striking feature. At his desk, he leads off with a few paragraphs, giving this same gist in simple narrative, so that the hasty newspaper reader may learn the facts in the first half-minute and, if they do not interest him, skip elsewhere. This opening summary is followed by a more elaborate account which brings in the interesting incidentals. Frequently this approaches literary form; and the writer improves it in later editions of the paper (drawing upon his imagination now and then, alas!). Now, let the story writer do likewise. Having an idea for a story, let him first sketch it in the following form:' • The theme is • • The main complication is • • The dominant character is • • The decisive character trait is • • The crucial situation is • • The outcome is • In answering these questions, do not use single words or phrases. Use declarative sentences, whenever possible. The meaning of these questions will be cleared up in later sections of this chapter. Other modes of expression are hazy and may only conceal a vagueness in your own mind. Next, draw up a bald report of the story in less than 500 words, mentioning only as much as is needed to make it absolutely clear. State it as though you were reporting an actual happening for a newspaper. Finally, expand it so as to produce the strongest possible single effect. 2. What the simple report must contain. This is the first matter to be settled after the general idea of the story has been hit upon. The writer must fix upon his material before concerning himself with its literary form. Now, this material includes: The circumstances giving rise to the main complication. The persons actively involved in the main complication. The main complication itself. The character trait (if any) which shapes the course of events. The crucial situation (sometimes ambiguously called the climax), in which the consequences of the initial complication reach their highest intensity. The outcome or solution of the crucial situation (sometimes called the denouement. ) g. The import (or lesson) of the story, if it happens that this is as striking as the events themselves. To illustrate these contents, look at Kipling's The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes. The generating circumstances of thisstoryare, on the one hand, the alleged Hindu custom of consigning to an open-air prison those who recover from trance and catalepsy; and, on the other hand, Jukes' business visit to a desert where such a prison was situated, and his falling ill of fever and chasing a wild dog, in his delirium. The persons actively involved in the main complication are Jukes, Gunga Dass, and the sentinel. The main complication is Jukes' tumbling into the horrible village of the officially dead, whence escape seems impossible. The character trait which shapes the course of events is Gunga Dass' greed; his treachery also counts heavily. (But neither actually solves the complication; in other words, this is not a character story. ) The crucial situation is that in which Gunga Dass assaults Jukes and leaves him at the quicksand's edge, robbed of the paper which showed the way of escape. The outcome is the arrival of Dunnoo at the edge of the pit, and his rescue of his master. The story has no import or lesson; it is simple adventure. In this respect most stories resemble it; and a very large number depict no important character trait. None of the other five materials, however, are ever wholly absent from a genuine story. The learner is particularly warned against slurring over the generating circumstances and the charactr tzat These are commonly neacted, to the reader's distress. Often minute incidents in the opening situation throw much light upon the later 'course of affairs, and so too do trifling deeds of the hero. It is all too easy to overlook such in the rush of the narrative. 3. The form of presentation. We now stand at the threshold of technique. To render the facts of the story is a reporter's task. But reporting is not storytelling. One may tell a truth without casting it into dramatic narrative, and without producing that single effect which is the very soul of the short story. Not all good narrative is drama, nor does all good drama yield a unified impression. But what, now, does fulfill the double ideal of our art? As has been said, there is no particular mechanical or outward form which all good stories alike assume. There is, though, a small set of principles which are deduced from the double ideal and produce the desired re sult. We have seen that the single effect may be produced either by developing a theme after the fashion of a narrative sermon, or else by stressing one or more of the three factors of the dramatic narrative, namely the character, the complication, or the setting. Now, this means that the effect is not contributed by something apart from the story proper; not by fine descriptions joined to the dramatic narrative, nor by a running fire of aphorisms on the side, nor by any other device save the plot itself. If the effect is produced by the theme, it is produced only in and through the events which demonstrate the theme, as in Hawthorne's The Great Stone Face. If it is produced by emphasis of a dramatic factor, it is again the narrative containing this factor that turns the trick. In short, the two ideals are realized, not by two distinct parts of a Story, but in each and every part of it identically. Their respective expressions are related as are pattern and argument, in prose exposition generally. This relation Stevenson aptly describes thus: The conjuror juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has proved unequal to his design. And on the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. . . . Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second that we. judge the strength and fitness of the first. . . . That style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural in the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or, if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigor. . . . 1 What argument is to exposition plot is to dramatic narrative; and, less exactly, the single effect corresponds to the pattern. For argument is the logical, and plot the historical or psychological sequence of developing items; and this same sequence, in its influence upon the reader, produces in him the impression of a fabric uniquely definite in texture and hue. This influence has long been called style and has been treated as an independent existence (which it is not). It is merely the dynamic phase of the writer's ideas. It is just as good and just as bad as those ideas; and, what is more to the point, it inhabits the very words and phrases which they do. And the producing of it is identical with the task of selecting and ordering the items of the story that will yield a single dramatic impression. This task I call integration. 4. Integration: what it is not. Integration, or the working up of parts into a whole, has been overdone in two directions; once toward the ideal of drama, and again toward that of the single effect. In the latter instance, Poe and not a few writers of 'atmosphere' and complication, aiming only to arouse a certain thrill, a particular quality of emotion, have so far succeeded that whatever drama their stories may hold potentially goes lost in the glare of the sensuous explosion. On the other hand, some writers who follow Howells, James, et al, subordinate all the elements to the evolution of the leading character. This practice has gained a certain orthodoxy in contemporary story technique. "In a well appointed story, " we are told, "not only must everything that happens grow naturally out of the situation, but it must seem to be the only thing that could happen under the circumstances. " 1This isthe ideal of that miscalled psychological realism, of recent vogue, whose eyes are fixed only on the play of the inevitable movings in human nature. , Now, all the errors of technique in these two directions are due, not to lack of artistic insight, but to the prior choosing of a too narrow ideal. The artist applies to stories at large the special devices of integration which perfect the kind of storyhelikes to tell; and, finding this is good, he fancies that he has come upon the recipe for all good story telling. The truth is, though, that the short story has no recipe; it has only principles. Its integration is not definable in terms of any single fixed relation between character and action, or situation and climax. And it is not, for the excellent reason that these factors themselves do not sustain a constant relation to one another. In many a complication story, for instance, there is no development of character, and in many a character story the complication is trifling. Therefore what Poe tells us about unifying the complication is, as a universal rule, quite as wrong as what Howells advises us to do by way of focusing upon the inner growth of the hero. 5. Integration: what it is. That integration is a principle rather than a formula appears as soon as we inspect the nature of narrative. A moment ago we compared narrative with exposition, pointing out that the latter is knit up according to logical principles, and the former according to psychological principles. Now, integration in expository writing is nothing more than the selecting and ordering of facts in such manner that they prove the main thesis. Of course, you cannot state the form of their connection in terms of special facts; you cannot say, for instance, that you must begin with generalities and proceed to particular instances, or that your first proposition should hint at the final premise. Far from it! There is only one rule, and that is that the order, as well as the choice, of facts is fixed by the logical effect you wish to produce. And the principle of order and choice is that of implication. Much the same situation occurs in narrative, but with one very important difference. And that difference springs from the fact that the aim of narrative is more various than that of exposition. Exposition aims only to proviNarrative aims to produce the feeling proper to a given idea. And this feeling varies with the idea; that is, it varies with the matter of fact. But there are many, many feelings; many sentiments, many emotions. This gives us a situation quite different from that in logic, which has at bottom only two types of proof; namely the deductive and the quasi-proof by probability. This difference is very profound, but we cannot here analyze it further, for it would soon carry us far into abstruse philosophy. Accept it as a fact, with the further qualification that, in narrative, the effect is produced by the particular quality of the facts ordered, no less than by their order and choice; whereas in exposition the effect is produced wholly by the logical relation of the data, and is utterly indifferent to their particular quality. Thus, it is all the same to the logical effect whether I prove thatA isB by showing that all A is M and all M is B; or by showing that all A is P, and all P is B; or that all A is X and all X is B. The outcome is identical in all cases. Not so in narrative, though. It makes all the difference in the world to the psychological effect as to the particular events wherewith I may show that Jones is a brave man. I might show it by exhibiting him in the act of defying his wife's request to tend to the furnace; or again by his carrying a cripple out of a burning building. In both instances you might sense his courage, but how unlike your emotions would be! From all this it follows that, in order to integrate a given set of items, you must first fix sharply the particular single effect at which you are aiming. For instance, suppose you wish to write a story about a wife who falls in love with a young friend of her stolid, unkind husband and, for honor's sake, diverts the youth's attention to another woman. ' This event, in its bald outline, has no single quality. It has many potential qualities. To name only two: it might be posed as as to bring out predominantly the animal pliability of the young lover in the wife's hands, in which case the single effect would be comedy, mildly cynical; or again, it might be turned so as to throw into relief the tremendous moral courage of the wife, who, though mismatched and wretched, rejects for honor's sake this belated chance of happiness; and with this turn pathos, tragedy, and moral exaltation would stir the reader. Now, is it not clear that the incidents you would choose to tell the story in the first way would not be the incidents which you would pick for the second narrative? And the arrangements would differ too. We commonly say that 'the same event' is either pathetic or tragic or ludicrous; but this is not accurate. It is more accurate to say that an event has many different bearings and relations, and that these latter, taken singly and ex- hibited apart, are in one case comic, in another tragic, and so on. So it is that, from a series of highly intricate happenings, the writer must select and arrange with an eye to the sentiment or mood he wishes to make dominant. SECTION II. INTEGRATIVE INTENSIFIERS If the remarks of the preceding section are correct, they urge the writer of stories to busy himself with all the materials and relations figuring in his prospective fiction and to seek in each of these the factors, groupings, and qualities which intensify the single effect he is, in the particular case, aiming at. All this is the task of diswvering integrators, and it is, I shall maintain, the supreme problem of technique. To it we now address ourselves. 1. What is intensity? It is worthwhile to ask just what this intensity of effect is which the story teller seeks. Singleness of effect is readily comprehended; but I venture to say that few persons know quite what they mean by the adverb when they say, for instance, that a story is 'intensely' pathetic. And yet, in the clear understanding of this one word lies the key to many mysteries of technique. Indeed, I think we may safely say more: it holds the master key. For intensity is the very soul of the short story, distinguishing it from the novel and most lesser forms of prose narrative. There is at least one characteristic common to all intensities, from that of the simplest sense impression up to that of enjoying Ibsen. Each of them is the amount of a certain quality cognized in a single instant. This sounds very abstruse, but it is a fact to which a few simple observations readily lead anyone who will take pains to make them. Suppose you listen to a note on a piano, struck now softly and then loudly. You say, of course, that the second sound is more intense than the first; and, if pressed for the meaning of your judgment, you promptly add that the louder tone, while identical with the softer in pitch, timbre, and other qualities, differs from it in that it is somehow `bigger', or contains more of the pitch and timbre. Or, again, look at two lights of precisely the same shade of red, one of which has double the others brilliancy. Do you not see more red in the brighter? Not a greater area of red, to be sure, but rather more of the red in the same area. We need not ask here how a color can be packed more thickly or thinly. Leave that worry to the physicists and metaphysicians. Enough to observe it is packed, that all other cognizable qualities also are, and that this peculiar condensation is what we call intensity. With these facts in hand, we may look at the more intricate literary instances of the same phenomenon. Insofar as the artistic effect of a story is concerned, a quality is present to us just as long as its specific feeling tone lingers in our consciousness, influencing our mood and the course of our thoughts. For it is this feeling-tone and not the full presence of the quality itself, that counts in shaping our impressions. Touching this matter, common speech is quite accurate when it says, of an evil odor or a painful thought or a happy discovery, that 'it stays with us' long after it has gone. The paradox is, like most others, merely verbal; the fact it states is very sure. Things do survive in their own effects. Hence it is that, at each moment of our lives, a multitude of things experienced in their pristine qualities a long time before is tinging all our sentiments. What these things are and how great their number is, nobody knows; but there is abundant psychological evidence to prove their host is great. The brilliant French philosopher, Bergson, believes that every minutest trifle a man has ever experienced 'stays with him' throughout his entire life; and this is not so absurd as it first seems. But, once more, we must leave that sort of question to the scientists. The lesser truth is quite enough for us, for it discloses the origin of art's most potent charms. This origin is in the coming together of many similar things in a single apprehension. Each thing sets up its own definite feeling in the person apprehending it; and similar things induce similar feelings. Now let these feelings occur simultaneously, and the result will be precisely that which we note in the brighter light and the louder sound. Each complex impression will contain more of one and the same quality, and this increase will be the quality intensified. Consider the most relevant of instances, fictional narrative, and let us choose the most conspicuously intense specimen of it, The Fall of the House of Usher. The opening paragraph of this abnormal fantasy forms a single impression, by which I mean that the reader virtually carries it all in mind at once. 'While reading the last phrases, the effects of the first still vibrate in him with horrible vividness; hence, in his own consciousness, the picture is one and instantaneous. Now, what is there in this picture? What feelings are awakened? Well, there are only two which sweep through the whole of it; insufferable gloom and mystery. And it is the former alone which is intensified with that incredible excess of diabolical skill which places Poe forever in a class by himself. Look away from the larger ideas of the passage; look only at the items. In the first twenty lines, we come upon these words: dull, dark, soundless, autumn, clouds, oppressively, low, alone, dreary, shades of evening, melancholy, insufferable gloom, unrelieved, sternest, desolate, terrible, bleak, vacant, utter depression of soul, hideous, bitter lapse, iciness, sinking, sickening, unredeemed dreariness, goading, torture. . . . One word in every six throughout the passage thunders the mood with hypnotizing iteration! Of course, their mere stringing together does not produce intense gloom; but the result comes when they are all focused and integrated into one scene or episode which is readily grasped in its unity. And it is precisely this focusing and integration which Poe has achieved, and toward which every writer with high ideals strives. The learner's duty is to discern those manipulations of form and material which focus, integrate, and thus intensify the single effect of dramatic narrative. 2. The general rule for intensification. If intensity is the amount of a given quality per impression, the general method of intensifying is therewith revealed. We may state it thus: Having chosen the single effect which is to be stressed, the writer must select and report only those features of the characters, the setting and the complication which produce that effect. And, if some features necessary to the coherent telling of the story do not produce the effect, they must be reported as colorlessly as possible, in order that they may not yield an antagonistic impression. Here we have, in new guise, the ancient and familiar rule of relevancy. Usually this has been applied chiefly to argumentation, and lately to plot; but it properly governs absolutely every detail of narrative. What its dictates are, we must now inquire. Every element of a story may, of course, serve to heighten the total effect. But there are five kinds which do so in a superlative degree. They are: • The dominant character. • • The plot action. • 3. The order of events. 4. The point of view • toward the story (artist's attitude). • • within the story (angle of narration). • 5. The atmosphere. These elements demand such extensive analyses that each must be discussed in a separate chapter. category:The writing process